Spider-Man 2

Extra: Click the downloads link to see Gregory John talk about the new features in the game in our video interview.

With a connection to one of the biggest movies of the year and a solid track record of Spider-Man games behind it, 2002's Spider-Man was a big game for all parties involved, most notably publisher Activision and developer Treyarch. The game sold in huge numbers and cemented Spider-Man as one of Activision's key properties alongside heavyweights like Doom and the Tony Hawk games.

Coming off a success like that can be daunting for a developer, and as Treyarch Senior Producer Gregory John claims, that's not always a bad thing. "The expectations ran very high," he says. "[The success] did inspire us to be innovative…to be revolutionary, since we didn't want to just give the player more of the same. Our goal was to give the definitive Spider-Man experience, so the player could live the life of Spider-Man."

So when Treyarch sat down to make a sequel, there were a few things they knew they wanted to include: an open city that let the player go anywhere, and web swinging that felt realistic. In the previous Spider-Man game, players were able to swing through the air, but the movement was limited as they couldn't move the character down to the streets and the webbing attached to an invisible ceiling up in the clouds. For Spider-Man 2, Treyarch overhauled this system, and made it so not only could Spider-Man run around on the streets, but his web would grab onto physical objects in the game world rather than the sky. With this approach, the angles at which the character swings around can be more realistic, and the physics system allows the movements combined with these angles to have a cinematic appearance.